About Me

I'm just me - a solitary wanderer who trekked across much of the world and recently retired to a small farm in the Ozarks.
My checkered past includes time spent as an Army officer, high school teacher and principal, real estate broker, child protection worker and administrator, and social worker with the U.S. military.
Over the years I have resided in a variety of places including Missouri, Virginia, Okinawa, Kansas, Kentucky, and Arizona. I have also traveled to Germany, Mexico, Canada, Russia, Sweden, Great Britain, Belize, Guatemala, Taiwan, Guam, South Korea, Vietnam, and numerous islands in the Caribbean - including Cuba.
I have ridden in a Russian ambulance, hitch-hiked across Moscow late at night, fought an ostrich, celebrated New Year's at a street party in Hanoi, and bicycled across the Caribbean. My travels have taken me to Ground Zero in Hiroshima, the Bolshoi Ballet, China Beach, and the White House kitchen.
The nine things in life that I am most proud of are my children: Nick, Molly, and Tim, and my grandchildren: Boone, Sebastian, Judah, Olive, Willow, and Sullivan.
Life has been very good to me indeed!

Friday, January 18, 2013

The Truther Outrage

by Pa RockCitizen Journalist

Conspiracy theories have abounded in America almost since
the dawn of the nation.Sometimes they
come about because of the obvious machinations of some of our more diabolical
leaders – Richard Nixon leaps to mind – and other times they are the result of
people seeking a more interesting or dramatic reason behind a significant
event.Once people buy into a conspiracy
theory, they build up defenses to ward off any factual challenges to what they
have come to accept as fact.In some
ways it becomes so ingrained that it almost feels like the adoption of a
religion.

Coming of age in the Watergate era, I have more than a
modest mistrust of what the government routinely grinds out as fact or
news.For instance, I feel that there is
more to the assassination of President Kennedy than we have been told in the
fifty years since the crime of the century in Dallas.But, even with my skepticism of the JFK
assassination story, I generally feel that our government is honest.Yes, George Bush and his people lied about
Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear weapon’s program, but not even Dick Cheney
was evil enough to bring about an attack on the World Trade Center just so he
could have his Middle East war for oil routes.

And therein lies the rub.Conspiracy theories used to be based in enough fact that they could
conceivably be possible, but today they have gotten so unhinged from reality as
to be just plain crazy – and mean.I
have a friend who believes fervently that our government brought down the Twin
Towers.He has sifted through all of the
evidence, incorporated that which contributes to his views into his belief
system, and rejected all that doesn’t fit what he wants to believe.My friend and his fellow travelers have been
labeled by a cynical media and society as “Truthers,” people who choose to
believe their complicated fantasy over what the rest of the world watched and
accepted over live television.

The truth, as The X-Files tells us, is out there.

As annoying as “Truthers” might be in an otherwise sane
world, they have been, until recently, relatively harmless.But now there is a new conspiracy theory
floating the mists of cyberspace that is so outrageous and preposterous as to
not only defy belief, but also to beg the notion that the existence of this
“theory” is far more likely to be a conspiracy itself.

I am speaking, of course, of the Sandy Hook Truthers, a
collection of sick pukes who believe (or say they believe) that their
government either arranged or fabricated the massacre at the Sandy Hook
Elementary School in Connecticut so that the federal government (and especially
its black, Kenyan, Muslim leader) would have an excuse to rush in and seize the
guns of barely law-abiding paranoid delusionals.

The gun industry and its well-paid stooges have been beating
the drum of gun sales for four years by warning that “Obama is coming to get
your guns.”When nothing significant
happened during his first term, the tune changed to one saying that he was
definitely coming to get the guns now - since he no longer has to stand for
re-election.

And then came Sandy Hook and the absolute horror that descended
on America.The gun lobby has pulled
out all of the stops in their intimidation of the American political system and
declared an all-out war on any sensible gun legislation.But there was still the problem of that pesky
massacre of a score of innocent first graders in Connecticut.

So enter the Sandy Hook Truthers, with more than a little
encouragement from those who make a living selling guns and ammunition.Some of these shameless souls have been busy
posting films on the Internet that “prove” that there was no massacre and the
kids are actually still alive.(How
would that feel to one of the parents who was called to the mortuary to
identify their child’s bloodied body?)Another group accepts that murders as actually having happened, but
proposes that the government “programmed” the mentally ill shooter into
committing the heinous crime.The
reason:So Obama could come and get your
guns.

The people promoting this garbage are awful beyond
words.True, many are undoubtedly too
mentally limited to realize just how harmful and hurtful their words are, but
more than a few of those fanning the fires of this disease know their premise
is one hundred percent false – however, they have a financial and political
investment in spreading it.“Shameless”
doesn’t begin to cover the evil of their intentional deception.

Novelist Sinclair Lewis once famously said, “When Fascism
comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”I beg to update the famous author:“When Fascism
comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross in one
hand and an automatic weapon with a hundred-round clip in the other.”